IDEAS & TRENDS; No Joke, The Troops Did Their Homework

By DAMIEN CAVE

Published: November 5, 2006

SENATOR JOHN KERRY says he flubbed a joke aimed at President Bush when he warned a group of students last week that they would get ''get stuck in Iraq'' if they didn't work hard in school. The president says Mr. Kerry demeaned the military by suggesting its men and women were ''uneducated.''

Mr. Kerry later apologized. He said he had never intended to insult the troops when he strayed from prepared remarks and told the audience, ''You know, education, if you make the most of it, you study hard, you do your homework and you make an effort to be smart, you can do well. If you don't, you get stuck in Iraq.''

But Mr. Kerry's botched remark did raise a question that went unanswered in the ensuing brouhaha. Is the military a career of last resort for the uneducated?

Though the military has a smaller proportion of college graduates than the country at large, it turns out that it has a higher proportion of people with high school diplomas, according to a comparison of figures from the Pentagon and the Census Bureau.

About 97 percent of the 1.4 million Americans serving in the active duty Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines have graduated from high school or the equivalent, according to Pentagon figures. That compares with 85 percent of all adults 25 years or older who reported they had completed at least high school, according to a 2005 survey by the Census Bureau.

Roughly 17 percent of the active duty members of the military have a bachelor's or graduate degree, the Pentagon figures show, while in the nation as a whole, 28 percent of adults reported they had at least a bachelor's degree.

Of the 274,143 Americans deployed to Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere around the world as of Sept. 30 -- including members of the National Guard and Reserves -- the ratios were roughly the same. About 97 percent had graduated from high school and about 16 percent from college, including 8,469 officers with master's degrees, and 2,525 with doctorates.

College graduates have historically been underrepresented because the military focuses most of its recruitment efforts on high school students, and many of them join so they can eventually earn a college degree with the help of the G.I. Bill of Rights.

Recently, there have been indications that the military is inducting less-educated recruits. The Army -- which has more troops in Iraq than any other military branch -- has struggled in its recruitment efforts as the Iraq war has continued. High school dropouts made up 19 percent of new enlistees this year, up from 6 percent in 2003.

''The quality clearly improved after we ended the draft and went to an all-volunteer force,'' said David Segal, a military sociologist at the University of Maryland. ''My sense is that it is going down now slightly at the margins, with fewer high school graduates signing up, but that's only at the margins.''